Sustainability of Urban Development with Population Decline in Different Policy Scenarios: A Case Study of Northeast China

Zhenshan Yang
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Zhenshan Yang: Key Lab of Regional Sustainable Development and Modelling, Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 22, 1-17

Abstract: Urban shrinkage is becoming a major global challenge and causing a series of challenges to the sustainable urban development. In this study, a system dynamics-based model was proposed and used to dynamically evaluate the sustainability of the urban development under five different policy scenarios in response to population shrinkage. A model was applied to socioeconomic data from eight shrinking cities in Northeast China from 2002 to 2017 to investigate the past and future trends in their urban development sustainability from 2002 to 2035. The results show that the development sustainability indices of the eight cities increased overall up to 2017. However, some then peaked and are now declining. The model predicts that the cities would vary considerably in their development sustainability across the five different scenarios. For example, with smart shrinkage policies, cities are predicted to sustain their current levels of development sustainability; meanwhile, with anti-shrinkage policies, where growth-oriented development is pursued, some cities are also predicted to see improvements in sustainability. The present study provides a technical approach to simulating and investigating the circular feedback mechanism between components of a city system and effectively correlating population shrinkage with urban development sustainability across different policy responses to urban shrinkage.

Keywords: urban shrinkage; sustainable development; system dynamics; population decline; Northeast China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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